Food products are cut or otherwise divided into smaller portions by processors in accordance with customer needs. Also, excess fat, bone or other foreign or undesirable materials are routinely trimmed from the food products. Much of the portioning/trimming of the food products, is now carried out with the use of high-speed portioning machines. These machines use various scanning techniques to ascertain the size and shape of the food product as it is being advanced on a moving conveyor. This information is analyzed with the aid of a computer to determine how to most efficiently portion the food product into the desired sizes, weights, or other criteria being used. For example, if the food product portions of a specific weight are desired, the information from the scanner may be employed to control the operation of a cross-cutting device to cut the food product into desired sizes. If the food product changes in width or thickness along its length, the location of a cross-cut made in the food product to achieve a desired end portion weight may be controlled.
The scanning of food products and the use of the scanning data to analyze the food products and determine how to cut, slice, or otherwise process the food products is facilitated if the food products are all aligned in the same direction. The reason for this is that portioning of a food product, such as fish, poultry or meat, is carried out in relationship to the shape of the food product. For example, fish strips are cut perpendicular to the long axis of the fish fillet. Beef tip-steaks are cut from two dimensions at approximately right angles determined by the edges of the roughly triangular input product. Further, chicken sandwich portions and nuggets are cut from whole chicken breasts with regard to the left-right symmetry relative to the keel of the breast. If the food products are carefully placed on the infeed belt with all of the food products having the same orientation, then the software used to determine how to portion the food product only needs to establish food product location in one direction, i.e., transverse to the length of the conveyor belt. For food products, achieving such alignment is difficult. It requires close attention by loading personnel, which is not always feasible or realistic.